Really, it's no more difficult than converting the non-alternating output of e.g. steam boilers or pressurised water into synchronised AC power - something which has been done since the advent of AC power generation. an AC generator generally produces AC at a frequency that is a fixed multiple (or one of a small selection of multiples) of the speed of a shaft. Synchronisation is achived by varying the speed of the generator until it matches the grid before tying it in. After that it will tend to stay synchronised by itself. Overall grid frequency is kept within tollerance by varying the ammount of power put into the grid.
so the problem then comes how to turn a source of motion where power and speed are both varying all the time into a feed with constant speed but varying power. Certainly doable mechanically but not exactly trivial.
I was always under the impression that Maxtor were one of the less reliable drive brands and Seagate were one of the better ones
(*) On average, over a large number of drives. HDs are one of those things where, for *any* brand, you'll find people who've had a bad experience with it, making anecdotal evidence not too useful in itself.
The impression I always got is that all the brands go through good periods and bad periods. The problem is that you can't tell if a brand is in a good period or a bad period until several years down the line when the bad drives actually start to fail.
Afaict NTFS is better than fat. IIRC it has journalling which saves a lot of time disk checking after unclean shutdowns and helps protect against curruption. It has support for file permissions (though admittedly on external drives those are probablly more trouble than they are worth). It doesn't have a 2GB file size limit.
Of course files that are not part of any package can and will be overwritten by the package manager. The point you seem to be missing is that many many important config files (including/boot/grub/menu.lst, the rough equivilent of boot.ini ) are NOT managed by the package manager itself but by code called from packages maintainer scripts.
If you have been provided with a "written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange" and you are distributing non commercially then you can pass on a copy of the offer. In all other cases you are responsible for either distributing the source with the binary, offering equivilent access to copy from the same place (in the case of distribution by allowing access to copy) or providing a written offer as above.
At least that is the case for GPLV2, i'm not sure what the suitation is for GPLV3
When people first got XP running on intel macs they did it by modifying XP not modifying the firmware.
Really for any modern OS the bios is only needed for very early boot and modifying the relavent bits of the OS isn't going to be too hard. Especially when the hardware configuration is fixed.
There are ways to rig a parachute so it opens without someone pulling a cord, iirc the normal one is a second very small parachute which you don't pack up at all attatched to the ripcord. The military drop parachutes with just equipment on all the time.
With people they have the person pull the cord because that gives more control to open the parachute at the best time (e.g. after making sure they are well clear of the plane).
What he did not justify is how he went from a falling velocity of 125 meters per second to a deceleration of 6250 meters per second per second
Also his conversion from newtons to Gs is wrong 1G is 9.8 newtons so 3125 newtons is roughly 319G
The correct answer given a mass and a height is to say that you have not been given enough information to answer the question, to answer the question mathematically requires a lot of knowlage of the material properties of both the falling item and the surface being hit.
dpkg on Debian and derived distros whines mightily if it finds a file already in use while installing a new package. If a package has a file conflict with a package already on the system dpkg flat out refuses to unpack it unless you use the --force-overwrite (or --force-all but using that is generally a bad idea).
BUT it's not perfect there are a couple of loopholes
1: if the file wasn't installed by dpkg it will be silently overwritten. This includes files managed by packages "maintainer scripts" (preinst, postinst, prerm and postrm) 2: maintainer scripts can overwrite anything they like.
it declares certain files (usually those living in/etc) conffiles Some files are indeed confiles, mostly configuration files for less well maintained/integrated packages and config files that are rarely touched.
If a conffile has been edited (which by policy can only happen if the adminstator or a third party script does it, packages shipped with debian aren't allowed to touch them) then on upgrade the sysadmin has to manually decide what to do about the problem.
Most of the more frequently changed configuration files are created and updated by the packages maintainer scripts.
but probably isn't practical for modern surface-mount flash chips As long as they are chips with leads sticking out it is possible. IIRC at least one of the people involved in xbox hacking used such clip. The clips cost a small fortune though.
BGAs are a whole different ball game, if the board maker has used a grid of throhole vias you might stand a chance going in from the back. If they have used blind or worse burried vias you are probablly SOL unless you are prepared to sacrifice one unit to reverse engineer the PCB (which involves delaminating it using seriously nasty chemicals then scanning the individual layers then trying to put them back together).
I take it you haven't tried Vista yet. I have, there are a few changes but mostly it doesn't seem to have changed that much (mind you the very first thing I do on both XP and Vista is select classic theme and classic start menu).
PowerPC support was not through an emulator. I never said it was, I said I didn't know whether there was an emulator included to allow i386 binaries to run on powerpc windows (I know there was one included with alpha windows to run i386 binaries and I think there is one in IA64 windows too because the native backwards compatibility really really sucks).
As for IA64, windows XP and server 2003 support it (though updates for XP on it have been dropped). Vista doesn't but server 2008 will unless they pull it at the last minuite (like they did with alpha support on win2K).
"Q. Can end users return to Windows Vista Business or Windows Vista Ultimate software after they downgrade? A. Yes. End users who downgrade may reinstall the original software when they are ready to migrate. For example, an end user who downgrades to Windows XP Professional may later return to Windows Vista Business software provided that the end user deletes the Windows XP Professional software from the PC."
Most big companies are going to reimage anyway. If they buy with vista then they can easilly downgrade to XP without paying any extra but if they buy with XP then when they want to put vista on them (which they probablly will evenutally) they will have to pay to do so.
big companies would be stupid to select XP IMO (assuming there is no price difference between XP pro and vista buisness which there probablly won't be). Vista buisness comes with dowgrade rights to XP pro which big companies can excercise easilly using thier VLK media. If they bought the machines with XP they would have to buy some kind of upgrade (probablly "software assurance") later when they wanted to put vista on them.
Though I think it would help if Microsoft released a version of Windows for the PowerPC. They already did with NT 3.51 and NT4 though they dropped it again pretty quickly and there are all the issues being a different architecture has on other operating systems to contend with too (i'm not sure if it had an emulation layer for running i386 binaries or not).
IIRC they also produced a version of NT4 for powerpc with updated directx for XBOX 360 developers which they supplied to said developers on powermacs.
How compatible is it with high speed processes? Most higher speed FPGAS use volatile configuration (usually loaded from either a computer system or from a serial flash chip on startup) because flash technology puts a lot of nasty constraints on your semiconductor process,
First here is how most phone contracts work in the US and the UK.
You pay a set monthly fee, they give you either a cheap phone free or a discount off a good phone every so often as part of the contract. Your monthly fee is the same whether you take the new free/discounted phone or not. Sometimes the phones are locked othertimes not but they can usually be unlocked fairly easilly. Pay as you go phones are often slightly subsidised and are usually locked but since pay as you go tends to be used by people with little money (children, students, poor adults) they tend to be low end phones.
Now to the iPhone.
Apple was a new player in the phone market so they didn't have much influence. They also wanted network support for certain features (mainly visual voicemail)
They could have just sold the iPhone unlocked but few would have been prepared to pay the iPhone's true price AND their contract subscription (which as I said above is the same whether they take the carriers free/discounted phone or not). They also would not have been able to get network support for thier features this way. They could have gone the route most phone makers do of selling them both unlocked to the public and to carriers to resell and if they wish lock but they would have risked no carriers taking the phone (putting them back to the first scenario).
Instead they went for an unusual but lucrative setup. They gave one provider an exclusive deal but required that provider to support things like visual voicemail to get it. Rather than go for the normal method of selling via the provider they went for selling the phones first and getting a cut of contract revenue later (why they did it this way i'm not sure but I suspect it was not wanting to have people messing with contract paperwork in the apple stores, they may have also thought over the long term they could get more money that way).
Of course people unlocked the iPhone using hacks. Especially as they could buy them and never activate them and therefore avoid paying the real cost of the phone but doing so was risky as firmware updates could brick the phone (and at least one update DID brick a load of iphones) and apple could update the iphone so newer units weren't so easy to unlock (afaict the only method that works on the latest iPhones is to cut your sim down then insert it in a special proxy unit that makes it look like an iPhone sim at the moment, however the proxy unit is selling out).
Thanks to french law legit unlocked iPhones can now be purchased but the price is pretty steep (about $1000 iirc).
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Really, it's no more difficult than converting the non-alternating output of e.g. steam boilers or pressurised water into synchronised AC power - something which has been done since the advent of AC power generation.
an AC generator generally produces AC at a frequency that is a fixed multiple (or one of a small selection of multiples) of the speed of a shaft. Synchronisation is achived by varying the speed of the generator until it matches the grid before tying it in. After that it will tend to stay synchronised by itself. Overall grid frequency is kept within tollerance by varying the ammount of power put into the grid.
so the problem then comes how to turn a source of motion where power and speed are both varying all the time into a feed with constant speed but varying power. Certainly doable mechanically but not exactly trivial.
I was always under the impression that Maxtor were one of the less reliable drive brands and Seagate were one of the better ones
(*) On average, over a large number of drives. HDs are one of those things where, for *any* brand, you'll find people who've had a bad experience with it, making anecdotal evidence not too useful in itself.
The impression I always got is that all the brands go through good periods and bad periods. The problem is that you can't tell if a brand is in a good period or a bad period until several years down the line when the bad drives actually start to fail.
The script needs to run just once - at system boot
That is true if the drive is always present and switched on all the time from bootup to shutdown.
udev or similar set to run when the drive appears would be better than cron but are also yet another tool to learn.
Afaict NTFS is better than fat. IIRC it has journalling which saves a lot of time disk checking after unclean shutdowns and helps protect against curruption. It has support for file permissions (though admittedly on external drives those are probablly more trouble than they are worth). It doesn't have a 2GB file size limit.
Of course files that are not part of any package can and will be overwritten by the package manager. /boot/grub/menu.lst, the rough equivilent of boot.ini ) are NOT managed by the package manager itself but by code called from packages maintainer scripts.
The point you seem to be missing is that many many important config files (including
If you have been provided with a "written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange" and you are distributing non commercially then you can pass on a copy of the offer. In all other cases you are responsible for either distributing the source with the binary, offering equivilent access to copy from the same place (in the case of distribution by allowing access to copy) or providing a written offer as above.
At least that is the case for GPLV2, i'm not sure what the suitation is for GPLV3
When people first got XP running on intel macs they did it by modifying XP not modifying the firmware.
Really for any modern OS the bios is only needed for very early boot and modifying the relavent bits of the OS isn't going to be too hard. Especially when the hardware configuration is fixed.
Hell it will probablly work even if the phone isn't FCC approved (it won't be legal but that is another matter)
sorry I screwed up 1G is 9.8 newtons per kilo so his conversion from newtons to G was right for a half newton object.
There are ways to rig a parachute so it opens without someone pulling a cord, iirc the normal one is a second very small parachute which you don't pack up at all attatched to the ripcord. The military drop parachutes with just equipment on all the time.
With people they have the person pull the cord because that gives more control to open the parachute at the best time (e.g. after making sure they are well clear of the plane).
OverlordQ got the equation he quoted right.
What he did not justify is how he went from a falling velocity of 125 meters per second to a deceleration of 6250 meters per second per second
Also his conversion from newtons to Gs is wrong 1G is 9.8 newtons so 3125 newtons is roughly 319G
The correct answer given a mass and a height is to say that you have not been given enough information to answer the question, to answer the question mathematically requires a lot of knowlage of the material properties of both the falling item and the surface being hit.
dpkg on Debian and derived distros whines mightily if it finds a file already in use while installing a new package.
/etc) conffiles
If a package has a file conflict with a package already on the system dpkg flat out refuses to unpack it unless you use the --force-overwrite (or --force-all but using that is generally a bad idea).
BUT it's not perfect there are a couple of loopholes
1: if the file wasn't installed by dpkg it will be silently overwritten. This includes files managed by packages "maintainer scripts" (preinst, postinst, prerm and postrm)
2: maintainer scripts can overwrite anything they like.
it declares certain files (usually those living in
Some files are indeed confiles, mostly configuration files for less well maintained/integrated packages and config files that are rarely touched.
If a conffile has been edited (which by policy can only happen if the adminstator or a third party script does it, packages shipped with debian aren't allowed to touch them) then on upgrade the sysadmin has to manually decide what to do about the problem.
Most of the more frequently changed configuration files are created and updated by the packages maintainer scripts.
but probably isn't practical for modern surface-mount flash chips
As long as they are chips with leads sticking out it is possible. IIRC at least one of the people involved in xbox hacking used such clip. The clips cost a small fortune though.
you can also solder individual wires to the pins on the IC to reprogram it e.g. http://7mc.org/nds/ppflash/ppflash.jpg
BGAs are a whole different ball game, if the board maker has used a grid of throhole vias you might stand a chance going in from the back. If they have used blind or worse burried vias you are probablly SOL unless you are prepared to sacrifice one unit to reverse engineer the PCB (which involves delaminating it using seriously nasty chemicals then scanning the individual layers then trying to put them back together).
they do use boot.ini but as others have said this is not fatal in all cases because of a fallback system in the XP bootloader.
It *IS* a trivilaity, MS could change it in a heartbeat, hell even third parties have done it
I take it you haven't tried Vista yet.
I have, there are a few changes but mostly it doesn't seem to have changed that much (mind you the very first thing I do on both XP and Vista is select classic theme and classic start menu).
no but they did lock IE7 to XP and up only. I strongly suspect they will lock the next IE to vista and up.
PowerPC support was not through an emulator.
I never said it was, I said I didn't know whether there was an emulator included to allow i386 binaries to run on powerpc windows (I know there was one included with alpha windows to run i386 binaries and I think there is one in IA64 windows too because the native backwards compatibility really really sucks).
As for IA64, windows XP and server 2003 support it (though updates for XP on it have been dropped). Vista doesn't but server 2008 will unless they pull it at the last minuite (like they did with alpha support on win2K).
You get to chose one or the other. Forever.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/f/4/5f4c83d3-833e-4f11-8cbd-699b0c164182/royaltyoemreferencesheet.pdf
"Q. Can end users return to Windows Vista
Business or Windows Vista Ultimate software
after they downgrade?
A. Yes. End users who downgrade may reinstall
the original software when they are ready to
migrate. For example, an end user who
downgrades to Windows XP Professional may
later return to Windows Vista Business software
provided that the end user deletes the Windows
XP Professional software from the PC."
MS moved the end of retail and big brand OEM availibility to the end of june 2008 so there is a bit of time yet.
:)
The end of system builder (whitebox OEM) availibility is at the end of january 2009 as originally planned.
There is nothing stopping suppliers stocking up on retail copies and whitebox OEM packs. I don't know if that can be done with big brand OEM too.
And finally vista buisness comes with downgrade rights to XP pro
Did you actually read my post?
Most big companies are going to reimage anyway. If they buy with vista then they can easilly downgrade to XP without paying any extra but if they buy with XP then when they want to put vista on them (which they probablly will evenutally) they will have to pay to do so.
big companies would be stupid to select XP IMO (assuming there is no price difference between XP pro and vista buisness which there probablly won't be). Vista buisness comes with dowgrade rights to XP pro which big companies can excercise easilly using thier VLK media. If they bought the machines with XP they would have to buy some kind of upgrade (probablly "software assurance") later when they wanted to put vista on them.
Though I think it would help if Microsoft released a version of Windows for the PowerPC.
They already did with NT 3.51 and NT4 though they dropped it again pretty quickly and there are all the issues being a different architecture has on other operating systems to contend with too (i'm not sure if it had an emulation layer for running i386 binaries or not).
IIRC they also produced a version of NT4 for powerpc with updated directx for XBOX 360 developers which they supplied to said developers on powermacs.
How compatible is it with high speed processes? Most higher speed FPGAS use volatile configuration (usually loaded from either a computer system or from a serial flash chip on startup) because flash technology puts a lot of nasty constraints on your semiconductor process,
First here is how most phone contracts work in the US and the UK.
You pay a set monthly fee, they give you either a cheap phone free or a discount off a good phone every so often as part of the contract. Your monthly fee is the same whether you take the new free/discounted phone or not. Sometimes the phones are locked othertimes not but they can usually be unlocked fairly easilly. Pay as you go phones are often slightly subsidised and are usually locked but since pay as you go tends to be used by people with little money (children, students, poor adults) they tend to be low end phones.
Now to the iPhone.
Apple was a new player in the phone market so they didn't have much influence. They also wanted network support for certain features (mainly visual voicemail)
They could have just sold the iPhone unlocked but few would have been prepared to pay the iPhone's true price AND their contract subscription (which as I said above is the same whether they take the carriers free/discounted phone or not). They also would not have been able to get network support for thier features this way. They could have gone the route most phone makers do of selling them both unlocked to the public and to carriers to resell and if they wish lock but they would have risked no carriers taking the phone (putting them back to the first scenario).
Instead they went for an unusual but lucrative setup. They gave one provider an exclusive deal but required that provider to support things like visual voicemail to get it. Rather than go for the normal method of selling via the provider they went for selling the phones first and getting a cut of contract revenue later (why they did it this way i'm not sure but I suspect it was not wanting to have people messing with contract paperwork in the apple stores, they may have also thought over the long term they could get more money that way).
Of course people unlocked the iPhone using hacks. Especially as they could buy them and never activate them and therefore avoid paying the real cost of the phone but doing so was risky as firmware updates could brick the phone (and at least one update DID brick a load of iphones) and apple could update the iphone so newer units weren't so easy to unlock (afaict the only method that works on the latest iPhones is to cut your sim down then insert it in a special proxy unit that makes it look like an iPhone sim at the moment, however the proxy unit is selling out).
Thanks to french law legit unlocked iPhones can now be purchased but the price is pretty steep (about $1000 iirc).